If you really believe what you write about the debt, how can you even consider nationalized health care, to the tune of a few trillion more.

Also because what is good for the future veterans of our upcoming war with Iran ought to be good enough for the rest of us, who are consigning them to that fate.

In particular, healthcare is very poorly served by the profit motive. Nationalized healthcare is one way to put paid to profit in healthcare.

If you really believe what you write about the debt, how can you even consider nationalized health care, to the tune of a few trillion more?

Because nationalized health care will cost less than the alternative; and the US cannot maintain a competitive economy with the rate at which health care costs are increasing.

Military is something only the government can (and only the government should) do.

Just curious - so you wouldn't approve of Blackwater/Xe?

http://www.macperformanceguide.com/

But I found that Disk Utility doesn't like partitioned disks in RAID.

There is no cheap solution to high performance :(

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/world/middleeast/04nuke.html

Full of allegations, mostly from anonymous sources, very little hard information.

Age brings wisdom, but only for the lucky few. For most it is a reversion to the worst aspects of their childhood personality or it is dementia.

It was George Tenet, CIA director, who told Bush the case for Iraq WMDs was "slam dunk"!

You have to understand what he was talking about. He meant if you slammed CIA detainees long enough and held their heads under water long enough (the dunk) or waterboarded them, then they uniformly agreed that Iraq had WMDs.

Whatever song-and-dance Saddam led us through, nevertheless he had not one W.M.D. Not a f***ing single one, but for which untold number of Iraqis, 4700 (Americans + Coalition) soldiers died, some 2 million refugees were created and a trillion dollars were burned which we now grudge for education and healthcare in the US.

And all because people of your type exhibit zero competence in evaluating evidence. The arms inspectors were very clear on this subject back in 2001 and 2002. But nooooo, you know better. I doubt that "shame" is a word in your vocabulary.

I seem to remember a similar orgasmic media when Secretary of Stte Madeleine Albright, I think that's her name, went to Pyongyang in 1994 and came back all giddy about her new friend Kim. Not too many years later there was a lout BOOOOMMMM! and low and behold, another nuclear power was born.

As Wiki points out, other events intervened:

"Even though U.S. President George W. Bush had named North Korea as part of an "Axis of Evil" following the September 11, 2001 attacks, U.S. officials stated that the United States was not planning any immediate military action.

According to John Feffer, co-director of the think tank Foreign Policy in Focus,

The primary problem is that the current U.S. administration fundamentally doesn’t want an agreement with North Korea. The Bush administration considers the 1994 Agreed Framework to have been a flawed agreement. It doesn’t want be saddled with a similar agreement, for if it did sign one, it would then be open to charges of "appeasing" Pyongyang. The Vice President has summed up the approach as: "We don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat evil."

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As wikipedia says: "Today, Japan's nuclear energy infrastructure makes it eminently capable of constructing nuclear weapons at will. However, the de-militarization of Japan and the protection of the United States' nuclear umbrella have led to a strong policy of non-weaponization of nuclear technology. On the other hand, this policy may be revised on account to the threat of a North Korean nuclear attack."

"While there are currently no known plans in Japan to produce nuclear weapons, it has been argued Japan has the technology, raw materials, and the capital to produce nuclear weapons within one year if necessary, and some analysts consider it a de facto nuclear state for this reason.[20] For this reason Japan is often said to be a "screwdriver turn" away from possessing nuclear weapons.

Significant amounts of plutonium are created as a by-product of the nuclear energy industry, and Japan was reported in December 1995 to have 4.7 tons of plutonium, enough for around 700 nuclear warheads. Japan also possesses an indigenous uranium enrichment plant[21] which could hypothetically be used to make highly enriched uranium suitable for weapon use. Japan has also developed the M-V three-stage solid fuel rocket, similar in design to the U.S. LGM-118A Peacekeeper ICBM, which could serve as a delivery vehicle.

It has been pointed out that as long as Japan enjoys the benefits of a "nuclear-ready" status it will see no reason to actually produce nuclear arms, since by remaining below the threshold, albeit with the capability to cross it at short notice, Japan can expect the support of the US while posing as an equal to China and Russia."

Would in not be the path of least resistance change Iranian law with the stroke of a pen, teach the population that they need to pay for what they use like the rest of the world, an do more oil exploration like the rest of the world?

The US has not been able to rid itself of agricultural subsidies that the W.T.O. frowns upon, that affect a relatively small population. You think Iran can turn around and tell its whole population to take a hike? Especially when the regime that runs things is already unpopular?

In some ways, being a politician in a democratic country is much less stressful. The worst that can happen to you is that you lose elections. In other places, politics can be more life-and-death than that :)

-Arun